Bog Myrtle & Peat

Another calf that wouldn’t suck, and I should do away with this cow with her tits like chapel hat pegs. She’s just too big, and her calves find it so hard to suck from her that it wears them down to the bone. They’re keen at first, but with several successive failures, they begin to… Continue reading

It’s hard to imagine that storks could ever lose their novelty. They’re enormous, and the rattling displays which accompany every departure and return of birds from the nest is uproarious. Necks are bent back to unthinkable angles, wings slump deadly down with elation as the beaks are made to snip and clatter like sewing machines.… Continue reading

There are painted shapes in the rocks at Monfragüe, and the faintest ancient smears of human touch. But they’re hardly on display for public edification – you have to clamber up the desperate, jagged cliffs, following a zig-zag track to the foot of a rupture in the rock where the vultures are nesting. Some of… Continue reading

Horses swam in the harbour at Carnlough, and it was raining. A lorry had pulled up on the quay and the animals were being walked on long leads down the slipway to the water. They didn’t want to go in, but a touch from a whip steered them to the flatcalm sea where the rain… Continue reading

There are curlews in the Antrim Glens, and birds which call from the rush-mown upland fields. Seen from rock-tops and the crosses which stand on the summit of Slemish, moorland glides away to the inner workings of Ulster. Beyond Ballymena, there’s a glimpse of Lough Neagh and the gurly rise of the Sperrins and Eire;… Continue reading

“Book-learning is the thing. You’re a lucky man. No stock to feed, no milking times, no tillage Nor blisters on your hand, nor weather worries” These last few mornings I’ve been down to the lambing at dawn in a blend of weathers, from the startling low-light glare of a sun which plays upon the wheatears… Continue reading

It’s hard to draw a line between Donegal and the Dungeon Hills of Galloway. They’re almost interchangeable, and if you love the awful granite wreckage of ice-age mountains, you’d be as happy in one as the other. That’s the point, because the rocks of Ireland and Scotland can be made to overlap in all kinds… Continue reading

Kids take trout from the upland burn. It’s child’s play, and the watchers peer at the giggling flow, searching for the dum-dum slip of movement in the shingle. Then carrying rods and bags of kit to the sunlit stream, they prick the worms and cast them dreaming to bed.  A small trout is easily gulled… Continue reading

When the east wind dropped, I could hear lapwings calling in the moonlight. And in the morning with a clear sun exploding on the downcast fields, there were black and white tumultuous shapes in the air. I have so often bemoaned the lack of lapwings in this part of Galloway that these new arrivals felt… Continue reading

They’re old bones at San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan. Legend states that they came from the martyred remains of Catholics killed by Goths in the 4th century, but it’s more likely they were gathered in the aftermath of a terrible plague which swept the city in the 1600s. Skulls are heaped on every ledge of… Continue reading